Anyone for boiled cake? 100 years of cooking with the WI

Katy Salter meets the women giving the WI, which celebrates its 100th anniversary today, a thoroughly modern makeover, from meetings in pubs to burlesque evenings – although cake is never very far away...

WI meetings have always involved food. For many branches that means a catch-up over tea and shortbread in the village hall. For the Dalston Darlings, it’s red wine and fat chips at the Duke of Wellington pub in east London. Ranging in age from their early 20s to early 60s, the Darlings represent the modern face of the WI… but that doesn’t mean they’re not partial to a slice of home-made cake.

Committee members Maighréad Neligan, Charlotte Hotham, Bryony Shepherd, Nina Smith, Sarah Waldie and Emma Nicol are all catching up over a slice of boiled chocolate cake. This thrifty bake dates from 1941 and was originally made with marg, Camp coffee and without eggs. It’s one of 100 recipes given a contemporary makeover (in this case with icing and dark chocolate chips) for The WI Cookbook. “It looks a bit like a muffin, but tastes like a brownie – I like it,” says Sarah, as they discuss, over wine and the cake, everything from House of Cards to where to buy inflatable guitars for their next fundraising event.

The Women’s Institute turned 100 this year, and the new cookbook is a celebration of the organisation, and of the evolution of British food. Written and edited by food writer and WI member Mary Gwynn, it contains everything from a 1919 recipe for rosehip jelly through to couscous and venison steaks, via a Twenties economy cake made with lard, chicken mousse from the Thirties, and Fifties and Sixties forays into European dishes such as Spanish omelette and risotto Milanese. “The book tells a story about Britain over the last 100 years. It’s a social history of women and eating,” says Gwynn.

Indeed, the WI has had food at its heart from the start. The first WI opened in September 1915 in Anglesey, with the aim of bringing rural women together and encouraging them to help produce food at a time of grave shortages. Since then, the WI has played an important role in feeding and educating Britain: setting up food markets during the Depression, using Government-issued sugar to produce 5,300 tonnes of jams and preserves in the Second World War, and campaigning on everything from childhood obesity to saving the bees, sometimes decades before such issues were fashionable. “The WI has always had soft power, a subtle influence,” says Dalston Darling Emma Nicol.

Members of the WI taking a butchery class

“It is owing to the initiative of the ladies of the WI that recipes have been preserved, recorded and published,” wrote Elizabeth David in the introduction to her 1977 book English Bread and Yeast Cookery, for which she consulted old WI publications, among many other sources. Arguably the WI’s greatest influence is in preserving traditional recipes and cooking methods, both through its many national and regional publications and cookbooks and through its cookery school, Denman, in Oxfordshire. It was at Denman that a team of WI members, including trustee Anne Harrison, baked a traditional afternoon tea for the 2013 G7 summit. “George Osborne came to help put the jam on the scones,” says Anne.

When Mary Gwynn started researching the new WI cookbook, she planned to consult the official WI archive, but hit a snag as it was in the process of being moved to its current home in the LSE Women’s Library. So instead she went to the WI’s HQ and trawled through every issue of the WI magazine that has been published since 1919 (it was renamed WI Life in 2006). She also collected more than 200 WI cookbooks, both national and from local federations. “The local ones were vital because they were a record of what members were cooking and eating,” she says.

Time for a break: women share tea at a WI meeting in the 1960s

For contemporary recipes she issued a call-out on Facebook, which produced gems such as the luscious lemony tart from Tea and Tarts, a newer WI in Huddersfield which is more burlesque and comedy nights than jam and Jerusalem. She also spoke to older members of her own branch in East Sussex, including Daphne Thompson, who remembers eating the boiled chocolate cake (that the Dalston Darlings are tucking into today) on special occasions during the war. It was made with 3oz each of margarine and sugar, a tablespoon of cocoa, no eggs and “Government” powdered milk to fit the rationing allowance. The original recipe was Gwynn’s grandmother’s but like many in the book she has given it a subtle update for modern palates.

Although Gwynn was eventually able to consult the archive, she already had a wealth of material from first-hand sources. So how on earth did she decide which recipes would make the cut? “It was like doing an odd puzzle, because it had to work as a cookbook but be chronological and tell an interesting history,” she says. Gwynn knew she wanted the iconic cakes, scones and biscuits everyone would expect, but also plenty of savoury dishes and ones that reflected the changing decades and fashions – be it avocado vinaigrette in the Eighties or chocolate mousse in the Sixties. The one proviso was they had to be delicious, hence the exclusion of “brains with pineapple”, which she came across in a Home & Country feature called Cooking With Offal.

War effort: WI ladies making jam during the Second World War

Throughout its history, food has acted as social glue for the WI. A natter over tea and cake helps friendships form and new members feel welcome. “I don’t know what I’d be without the WI,” says Anne Harrison, who joined as a newly-wed in 1966 to make friends in her husband’s village. Traditionally, the W I provided a way for farmers’ wives and women from isolated rural homes to meet. It’s now fulfilling the same function for women in urban communities. “It can be really isolating in London,” says Dalston Darling Maighréad Neligan. “The older you get the harder it is to meet friends here,” says Charlotte Hotham, who helped start the branch in 2010.

The Darlings don’t bake cakes for meetings, as most of them dash to the pub after a busy day at work. Instead, “food is how we raise money for charity and group funds,” says Charlotte. This means everything from cheese and wine, baking cakes featuring a picture of Russell Brand’s face for one of his book launches, delivering fruit to a local night shelter, or running the tea tent at cool festivals such as Field Day or Land of Kings. Last year at Field Day “the tea urn could’ve kept going forever,” says Sarah, as hipsters queued for a cuppa and a slice of chocolate cake. Their tea tent featured a burlesque dancer and a selfie booth. But despite these very 2015 trimmings, the Darlings haven’t broken completely with tradition. “We follow the guidelines for meetings – everyone loves the parish notices and the housekeeping bits, like how much money we’ve raised,” says Charlotte.

As they tuck into their chocolate cake, some members admit they’re most likely to look for recipes via Google or Pinterest, but several have already ordered copies of the WI Cookbook, and all love its hot pink and grey cover. Conversation turns to the Sunday roast Sarah is making for her housemates. She is nervous about beef: “my roast nemesis”. Everyone chimes in with tips: “sear it first”; “ask the butcher for topside, it’s quite cheap”. The conversation isn’t so different from that at a village hall after all. It looks like the WI is in good shape for the next 100 years.